OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Analyzing Attacks on Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC)
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is one of the driving applications of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) and promises to bring more efficient and faster transportation through cooperative behavior between vehicles. In CACC, vehicles exchange information, which is relied on to partially automate driving; however, this reliance on cooperation requires resilience against attacks and other forms of misbehavior. In this paper, we propose a rigorous attacker model and an evaluation framework for this resilience by quantifying the attack impact, providing the necessary tools to compare controller resilience and attack effectiveness simultaneously. Although there are significant differences between the resilience of the three analyzed controllers, we show that each can be attacked effectively and easily through either jamming or data injection. Our results suggest a combination of misbehavior detection and resilient control algorithms with graceful degradation are necessary ingredients for secure and safe platoons.
Mathematical methods in solutions of the problems from the Third International Students' Olympiad in Cryptography
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

The mathematical problems and their solutions of the Third International Students' Olympiad in Cryptography NSUCRYPTO'2016 are presented. We consider mathematical problems related to the construction of algebraic immune vectorial Boolean functions and big Fermat numbers, problems about secrete sharing schemes and pseudorandom binary sequences, biometric cryptosystems and the blockchain technology, etc. Two open problems in mathematical cryptography are also discussed and a solution for one of them proposed by a participant during the Olympiad is described. It was the first time in the Olympiad history.
Neuro Fuzzy Modelling for Prediction of Consumer Price Index
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

Economic indicators such as Consumer Price Index (CPI) have frequently used in predicting future economic wealth for financial policy makers of respective country. Most central banks, on guidelines of research studies, have recently adopted an inflation targeting monetary policy regime, which accounts for high requirement for effective prediction model of consumer price index. However, prediction accuracy by numerous studies is still low, which raises a need for improvement. This manuscript presents findings of study that use neuro fuzzy technique to design a machine-learning model that train and test data to predict a univariate time series CPI. The study establishes a matrix of monthly CPI data from secondary data source of Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics from January 2000 to December 2015 as case study and thereafter conducted simulation experiments on MATLAB whereby ninety five percent (95%) of data used to train the model and five percent (5%) for testing. Furthermore, the study use root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) as error metrics for model evaluation. The results show that the neuro fuzzy model have an architecture of 5:74:1 with Gaussian membership functions (2, 2, 2, 2, 2), provides RMSE of 0.44886 and MAPE 0.23384, which is far better compared to existing research studies.
Learning Data-Efficient Rigid-Body Contact Models: Case Study of Planar Impact
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper we demonstrate the limitations of common rigid-body contact models used in the robotics community by comparing them to a collection of data-driven and data-reinforced models that exploit underlying structure inspired by the rigid contact paradigm. We evaluate and compare the analytical and data-driven contact models on an empirical planar impact data-set, and show that the learned models are able to outperform their analytical counterparts with a small training set.
Gradient-free Policy Architecture Search and Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We develop a method for policy architecture search and adaptation via gradient-free optimization which can learn to perform autonomous driving tasks. By learning from both demonstration and environmental reward we develop a model that can learn with relatively few early catastrophic failures. We first learn an architecture of appropriate complexity to perceive aspects of world state relevant to the expert demonstration, and then mitigate the effect of domain-shift during deployment by adapting a policy demonstrated in a source domain to rewards obtained in a target environment. We show that our approach allows safer learning than baseline methods, offering a reduced cumulative crash metric over the agent's lifetime as it learns to drive in a realistic simulated environment.
Primal-Dual $π$ Learning: Sample Complexity and Sublinear Run Time for Ergodic Markov Decision Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Consider the problem of approximating the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP) by sampling state transitions. In contrast to existing reinforcement learning methods that are based on successive approximations to the nonlinear Bellman equation, we propose a Primal-Dual $π$ Learning method in light of the linear duality between the value and policy. The $π$ learning method is model-free and makes primal-dual updates to the policy and value vectors as new data are revealed. For infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision process with finite state space $S$ and finite action space $A$, the $π$ learning method finds an $ε$-optimal policy using the following number of sample transitions $$ \tilde{O}( \frac{(τ\cdot t^*_{mix})^2 |S| |A| }{ε^2} ),$$ where $t^*_{mix}$ is an upper bound of mixing times across all policies and $τ$ is a parameter characterizing the range of stationary distributions across policies. The $π$ learning method also applies to the computational problem of MDP where the transition probabilities and rewards are explicitly given as the input. In the case where each state transition can be sampled in $\tilde{O}(1)$ time, the $π$ learning method gives a sublinear-time algorithm for solving the averaged-reward MDP.
Operational thermal load forecasting in district heating networks using machine learning and expert advice
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Forecasting thermal load is a key component for the majority of optimization solutions for controlling district heating and cooling systems. Recent studies have analysed the results of a number of data-driven methods applied to thermal load forecasting, this paper presents the results of combining a collection of these individual methods in an expert system. The expert system will combine multiple thermal load forecasts in a way that it always tracks the best expert in the system. This solution is tested and validated using a thermal load dataset of 27 months obtained from 10 residential buildings located in Rottne, Sweden together with outdoor temperature information received from a weather forecast service. The expert system is composed of the following data-driven methods: linear regression, extremely randomized trees regression, feed-forward neural network and support vector machine. The results of the proposed solution are compared with the results of the individual methods.
Nonlinear Interference Mitigation via Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

A neural-network-based approach is presented to efficiently implement digital backpropagation (DBP). For a 32x100 km fiber-optic link, the resulting "learned" DBP significantly reduces the complexity compared to conventional DBP implementations.
Integrated mmWave Access and Backhaul in 5G: Bandwidth Partitioning and Downlink Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

With the increasing network densification, it has become exceedingly difficult to provide traditional fiber backhaul access to each cell site, which is especially true for small cell base stations (SBSs). The increasing maturity of millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has opened up the possibility of providing high-speed wireless backhaul to such cell sites. Since mmWave is also suitable for access links, the third generation partnership project (3GPP) is envisioning an integrated access and backhaul (IAB) architecture for the fifth generation (5G) cellular networks in which the same infrastructure and spectral resources will be used for both access and backhaul. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for IAB-enabled cellular network using which we provide an accurate characterization of its downlink rate coverage probability. Using this, we study the performance of two backhaul bandwidth (BW) partition strategies, (i) equal partition: when all SBSs obtain equal share of the backhaul BW, and (ii) load-based partition: when the backhaul BW share of an SBS is proportional to its load. Our analysis shows that depending on the choice of the partition strategy, there exists an optimal split of access and backhaul BW for which the rate coverage is maximized. Further, there exists a critical volume of cell-load (total number of users) beyond which the gains provided by the IAB-enabled network disappear and its performance converges to that of the traditional macro-only network with no SBSs.
Procedural Modeling and Physically Based Rendering for Synthetic Data Generation in Automotive Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present an overview and evaluation of a new, systematic approach for generation of highly realistic, annotated synthetic data for training of deep neural networks in computer vision tasks. The main contribution is a procedural world modeling approach enabling high variability coupled with physically accurate image synthesis, and is a departure from the hand-modeled virtual worlds and approximate image synthesis methods used in real-time applications. The benefits of our approach include flexible, physically accurate and scalable image synthesis, implicit wide coverage of classes and features, and complete data introspection for annotations, which all contribute to quality and cost efficiency. To evaluate our approach and the efficacy of the resulting data, we use semantic segmentation for autonomous vehicles and robotic navigation as the main application, and we train multiple deep learning architectures using synthetic data with and without fine tuning on organic (i.e. real-world) data. The evaluation shows that our approach improves the neural network's performance and that even modest implementation efforts produce state-of-the-art results.
Clear Visual Separation of Temporal Event Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

Extracting and visualizing informative insights from temporal event sequences becomes increasingly difficult when data volume and variety increase. Besides dealing with high event type cardinality and many distinct sequences, it can be difficult to tell whether it is appropriate to combine multiple events into one or utilize additional information about event attributes. Existing approaches often make use of frequent sequential patterns extracted from the dataset, however, these patterns are limited in terms of interpretability and utility. In addition, it is difficult to assess the role of absolute and relative time when using pattern mining techniques. In this paper, we present methods that addresses these challenges by automatically learning composite events which enables better aggregation of multiple event sequences. By leveraging event sequence outcomes, we present appropriate linked visualizations that allow domain experts to identify critical flows, to assess validity and to understand the role of time. Furthermore, we explore information gain and visual complexity metrics to identify the most relevant visual patterns. We compare composite event learning with two approaches for extracting event patterns using real world company event data from an ongoing project with the Danish Business Authority.
A generative model for sparse, evolving digraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

Generating graphs that are similar to real ones is an open problem, while the similarity notion is quite elusive and hard to formalize. In this paper, we focus on sparse digraphs and propose SDG, an algorithm that aims at generating graphs similar to real ones. Since real graphs are evolving and this evolution is important to study in order to understand the underlying dynamical system, we tackle the problem of generating series of graphs. We propose SEDGE, an algorithm meant to generate series of graphs similar to a real series. SEDGE is an extension of SDG. We consider graphs that are representations of software programs and show experimentally that our approach outperforms other existing approaches. Experiments show the performance of both algorithms.
Describing Natural Images Containing Novel Objects with Knowledge Guided Assitance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Images in the wild encapsulate rich knowledge about varied abstract concepts and cannot be sufficiently described with models built only using image-caption pairs containing selected objects. We propose to handle such a task with the guidance of a knowledge base that incorporate many abstract concepts. Our method is a two-step process where we first build a multi-entity-label image recognition model to predict abstract concepts as image labels and then leverage them in the second step as an external semantic attention and constrained inference in the caption generation model for describing images that depict unseen/novel objects. Evaluations show that our models outperform most of the prior work for out-of-domain captioning on MSCOCO and are useful for integration of knowledge and vision in general.
Towards CT-quality Ultrasound Imaging using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The cost-effectiveness and practical harmlessness of ultrasound imaging have made it one of the most widespread tools for medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, the beam-forming based image formation produces granular speckle noise, blurring, shading and other artifacts. To overcome these effects, the ultimate goal would be to reconstruct the tissue acoustic properties by solving a full wave propagation inverse problem. In this work, we make a step towards this goal, using Multi-Resolution Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). As a result, we are able to reconstruct CT-quality images from the reflected ultrasound radio-frequency(RF) data obtained by simulation from real CT scans of a human body. We also show that CNN is able to imitate existing computationally heavy despeckling methods, thereby saving orders of magnitude in computations and making them amenable to real-time applications.
Do Convolutional Neural Networks Learn Class Hierarchy?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) currently achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in image classification. With a growing number of classes, the accuracy usually drops as the possibilities of confusion increase. Interestingly, the class confusion patterns follow a hierarchical structure over the classes. We present visual-analytics methods to reveal and analyze this hierarchy of similar classes in relation with CNN-internal data. We found that this hierarchy not only dictates the confusion patterns between the classes, it furthermore dictates the learning behavior of CNNs. In particular, the early layers in these networks develop feature detectors that can separate high-level groups of classes quite well, even after a few training epochs. In contrast, the latter layers require substantially more epochs to develop specialized feature detectors that can separate individual classes. We demonstrate how these insights are key to significant improvement in accuracy by designing hierarchy-aware CNNs that accelerate model convergence and alleviate overfitting. We further demonstrate how our methods help in identifying various quality issues in the training data.
Near-Optimal Adversarial Policy Switching for Decentralized Asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

A key challenge in multi-robot and multi-agent systems is generating solutions that are robust to other self-interested or even adversarial parties who actively try to prevent the agents from achieving their goals. The practicality of existing works addressing this challenge is limited to only small-scale synchronous decision-making scenarios or a single agent planning its best response against a single adversary with fixed, procedurally characterized strategies. In contrast this paper considers a more realistic class of problems where a team of asynchronous agents with limited observation and communication capabilities need to compete against multiple strategic adversaries with changing strategies. This problem necessitates agents that can coordinate to detect changes in adversary strategies and plan the best response accordingly. Our approach first optimizes a set of stratagems that represent these best responses. These optimized stratagems are then integrated into a unified policy that can detect and respond when the adversaries change their strategies. The near-optimality of the proposed framework is established theoretically as well as demonstrated empirically in simulation and hardware.
Design Considerations of a Sub-50 μW Receiver Front-end for Implantable Devices in MedRadio Band
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Emerging health-monitor applications, such as information transmission through multi-channel neural implants, image and video communication from inside the body etc., calls for ultra-low active power (<50$μ$W) high data-rate, energy-scalable, highly energy-efficient (pJ/bit) radios. Previous literature has strongly focused on low average power duty-cycled radios or low power but low-date radios. In this paper, we investigate power performance trade-off of each front-end component in a conventional radio including active matching, down-conversion and RF/IF amplification and prioritize them based on highest performance/energy metric. The analysis reveals 50$Ω$ active matching and RF gain is prohibitive for 50$μ$W power-budget. A mixer-first architecture with an N-path mixer and a self-biased inverter based baseband LNA, designed in TSMC 65nm technology show that sub 50$μ$W performance can be achieved up to 10Mbps (< 5pJ/b) with OOK modulation.
Data Driven Computational Model for Bipedal Walking and Push Recovery
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

In this research, we have developed the data driven computational walking model to overcome the problem with traditional kinematics based model. Our model is adaptable and can adjust the parameter morphological similar to human. The human walk is a combination of different discrete sub-phases with their continuous dynamics. Any system which exhibits the discrete switching logic and continuous dynamics can be represented using a hybrid system. In this research, the bipedal locomotion is analyzed which is important for understanding the stability and to negotiate with the external perturbations. We have also studied the other important behavior push recovery. The Push recovery is also a very important behavior acquired by human with continuous interaction with environment. The researchers are trying to develop robots that must have the capability of push recovery to safely maneuver in a dynamic environment. The push is a very commonly experienced phenomenon in cluttered environment. The human beings can recover from external push up to a certain extent using different strategies of hip, knee and ankle. The different human beings have different push recovery capabilities. For example a wrestler has a better push negotiation capability compared to normal human beings. The push negotiation capability acquired by human, therefore, is based on learning but the learning mechanism is still unknown to researchers. The research community across the world is trying to develop various humanoid models to solve this mystery. Seeing all the conventional mechanics and control based models have some inherent limitations, a learning based computational model has been developed to address effectively this issue. In this research we will discuss how we have framed this problem as hybrid system.
Deceased Organ Matching in Australia
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2017
Year: 2017

Despite efforts to increase the supply of organs from living donors, most kidney transplants performed in Australia still come from deceased donors. The age of these donated organs has increased substantially in recent decades as the rate of fatal accidents on roads has fallen. The Organ and Tissue Authority in Australia is therefore looking to design a new mechanism that better matches the age of the organ to the age of the patient. I discuss the design, axiomatics and performance of several candidate mechanisms that respect the special online nature of this fair division problem.
Simultaneous Recognition and Pose Estimation of Instruments in Minimally Invasive Surgery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Detection of surgical instruments plays a key role in ensuring patient safety in minimally invasive surgery. In this paper, we present a novel method for 2D vision-based recognition and pose estimation of surgical instruments that generalizes to different surgical applications. At its core, we propose a novel scene model in order to simultaneously recognize multiple instruments as well as their parts. We use a Convolutional Neural Network architecture to embody our model and show that the cross-entropy loss is well suited to optimize its parameters which can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. An additional advantage of our approach is that instrument detection at test time is achieved while avoiding the need for scale-dependent sliding window evaluation. This allows our approach to be relatively parameter free at test time and shows good performance for both instrument detection and tracking. We show that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art results on in-vivo retinal microsurgery image data, as well as ex-vivo laparoscopic sequences.
ComFlux: External Composition and Adaptation of Pervasive Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

Technology is becoming increasingly pervasive. At present, the system components working together to provide functionality, be they purely software or with a physical element, tend to operate within silos, bound to a particular application or usage. This is counter to the wider vision of pervasive computing, where a potentially limitless number of applications can be realised through the dynamic and seamless interactions of system components. We believe this application composition should be externally controlled, driven by policy and subject to access control. We present ComFlux, our open source middleware, and show through a number of designs and implementations, how it supports this functionality with acceptable overhead.
Jointly Optimal Spatial Channel Assignment and Power Allocation for MIMO SWIPT Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

The joint design of spatial channel assignment and power allocation in Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems capable of Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) is studied. Assuming availability of channel state information at both communications ends, we maximize the harvested energy at the multi-antenna receiver, while satisfying a minimum information rate requirement for the MIMO link. We first derive the globally optimal eigenchannel assignment and power allocation design, and then present a practically motivated tight closed-form approximation for the optimal design parameters. Selected numerical results verify the validity of the optimal solution and provide useful insights on the proposed designs as well as the pareto-optimal rate-energy tradeoff.